When aggregators attack: Techmeme’s headline-rewriting is just part of a larger shift

Techmeme, the technology-news aggregator run by Gabe Rivera, doesn’t announce changes to its editorial process that often, but when it does they are usually interesting — like the time the site launched “native advertising,” long before it became a topic of conversation in the media-sphere, or when Rivera announced that human editors are as important as algorithms (which, for those who don’t know him, is quite an admission). Now, the site has said it is going to start rewriting headlines for the posts that it aggregates.

As with most of his other announcements, this one is interesting in part because of what Rivera says, but also because of what he doesn’t say. What he does say is that many of the headlines that publishers put on their content don’t suit the site’s purpose, which is to communicate as much useful information as possible, as quickly and efficiently as possible —…